


Soho, 1980

by ileolai



Series: They're Homosexual, Susan (Good Omens) [1]
Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Atmospheric, Gen, an ode to old soho, nothing really happens
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-01
Updated: 2019-07-01
Packaged: 2020-05-20 21:30:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19385017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ileolai/pseuds/ileolai
Summary: If Aziraphale can sensed loved places, how does he feel about Soho, an historical mecca for outcasts who passionately defend it? This emerged from that thought.





	Soho, 1980

Soho is one of those places whose contradictions lend it a kind of magic.  
  
There's the adrift and cast-away slyly skirting the law, the hustlers eyeing your pockets, the writers slowly yellowing in their bedsits-- yet London's underworld has a heart at the center of it. There's a sense of camaraderie in the mess of it all.    
  
You might call it solidarity in heroic failure. Soho is wretched, but Soho is loved.  
  
An oddly professorial little man strolls by the neon-blazed strip joints and dilapidated walk-ups there, and anywhere else it might seem like he got lost on his way to a lectern at Oxford... a hundred years ago. Yet somehow his existence here makes perfect sense. He's a sort of institution, Mr. Fell-- as essential as the Georgian terraces and narrow stone-paved alleyways.   
  
It's almost as if he's been there just as long.   
  
(He's lived several millennia besides, actually, and chronically misbehaved all along more than anyone in Soho-- they might know him by name but the local food merchants certainly don't know  _that_. Or what it was for.)  
  
Tonight, he is anonymous. Walker's Court is bustling with cabaret patrons on a pleasantly warm evening. The man and his (unlikely, but constant) familiar walk together, saturated blue and red by the neon shopfronts, shoulders meeting every second step. Their destination is an antique bookshop a few streets beyond the alleyway, but there's no hurry to get there.  
  
There's a storm on the horizon, and to its single-minded engineers this cozy hub of debauchery is as inconsequential as anything else. Right now, though, that doesn't really matter. The two companions have a bottle of wine and the pulsing atmosphere of  _life_ and the comfortable bubble of each other's presence.   
  
(They're an equally wayward pair. It might take a storm to admit the truth of that, but right now it doesn't matter.)  
  
So they meander, bumping shoulders, wretched and loved as the shore they washed up on-- at home.


End file.
